Space connection: sílica-based aerogel has been tested in several space systems and can be used in landers, rovers, launchers, cryogenic tanks, entry/re-entry capsules. Business Model: produces and commercializes aerogels for space and non-space applications. Incubation period: 2015-2017

Space connection: Real Time Kinematics (RTK) relying on augmented GNSS. Business Model: is developing and integrating a system that automatically lands and docks a drone in a platform to perform battery switching. Incubation period: 2015-2017

Space connection: access to Copernicus real-time, use of Sentinel-1, for all-weather, day-and-night estimates of soil moisture, wind speed and direction, sea ice, continental ice sheets and glaciers; and Sentinel-3, for global, continuous observations of sea and land surface temperature, sea level, cloud top heights and cloud cover. Business Model: Our system is comprised of both hardware, the interrogator unit and the optical fibers with sensors and the predictive software, our big data platform. Incubation period: 2017-2019

Advantages: Fibersail is a Big Data Analytics tool based on a real time shape sensing system that will help turbine blade manufacturers better understand and improve their products, and wind turbine operators improve performance and availability while preventing failures and reducing maintenance costs for their wind turbines. Markets: Energy, Environment, Industrial maintenance.

Space connection: Findster products use GNSS satellites and EGNOS antennas to give you a real-time and high-precision position of your loved one. Business Model: Findster creates products to help you keep your loved ones safe and healthy. Incubation period: 2016-2017

Advantages: compared with Findster, existing solutions are a way to react and not to prevent missing cases, have a 2x lower battery life and are up to 10x more expensive over 2 years due to the required monthly fees. Markets: dog owners and parents with children from 2-9 years old.

Advantages: highly detailed and reliable routes that are calculated using the grade changes of the paths. The algorithm used for finding these routes also considers other variables that make our solution unique in providing energy efficient routes. Markets: Sports; Transport; Tourism; Smart Cities

Space connection: Smart integration of local sensors, combined with Sentinels 2/3, with permanent and fault tolerant position determination via GNSS/EGNOS receiver. Business Model: We provide a plug-and-play integrated solution to monitor and collect aquaculture data, scalable and easy to use (hardware and cloud-based dashboard), coupled with a SaaS Business Model. Incubation period: 2016-2018

Space connection: Major chemicals and physical properties obtained from near real time earth observation data satellite. Business Model: Startup devoted to the use of chemical distribution of major pollutants to issue alerts regarding air quality. SOUL concept combines dynamical mapping with space observation to issue alerts in real time and based on time evolution algorithms to citizens. Incubation period: 2015-2017

Advantages: In situ measurements using satellite data to improve quality of life of cities and citizens, creating a major layer mapping additionally information to fixed and dynamical air quality stations. Markets: Respiratory diseases; Joggers; City management; Insurance companies.

Advantages: GNSS and V2V technologies are used to retrieve an enhanced real-time location. This approach enables a more accurate location service with higher availability and coverage. Markets: Transportation companies; Companies aiming to reduce operational costs by increasing operational performance and efficiency.

Space connection: Earth Observation data from ESA and 3rd party missions (Sentinel, TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X). Business Model: Provides remote detection of archaeological sites and features based on satellite imagery. Incubation period: 2017-2019

Advantages: Allows for fast and accurate archaeological assessments of very large areas. Markets: Land development, building & construction, heritage.

Space connection: Samba is an engine to process and analyse satellite based Earth Observation data. The inception of Samba was motivated by the availability of open access EO data, specifically by ESA’s recent Sentinel-2 satellite system. Business Model: Raw EO data doesn’t contain actionable information for most business needs. Converting satellite imagery into value requires advanced technical skills, and massive computing power. Samba will make satellite based geospatial intelligence easy and accessible to all organizations through a self-service platform. Incubation period: 2017-2019

Space connection: The product uses GNSS signals for enhanced indoor positioning (especially the future Galileo with better indoor penetration) to guide people and Earth Observation images for the detection of changes on airports’ buildings morphology. Business Model: SCRAMJET, by WATERDOG mobile, matches flight reservations and smartly identifies business travellers that will be located in the same airport at the same time. SCRAMJET gets flight booking fees for every flight booked in the platform and aims at establishing affiliate programs with airlines, airports and airport businesses. Incubation period: 2016-2018

Advantages: SCRAMJET adds “business opportunities” as a new metric for flight planning and makes travel time and cost become better investments by allowing business travellers to take advantage of the time they spend in airports. Markets: Business events and business travelling.

Space connection: P50, a technology developed by Amorim Cork Composites to guarantee the appropriate thermal insulation of space shuttles, presents the required features to properly isolate Pavnext technology from multiple factors as noise, water, dust and heat. Business Model: Pavnext sells technological devices to implement in road pavements to infrastructure managers, using a B2B business model. Our devices are able to promote road safety in a unique way, to produce clean electric energy, and to generate data regarding traffic and energy. Incubation period: 2018-2020

Space connection: iTrack Solutions system increases intends to increase the safety in LSA (Light Sport Aircraft) and Experimental aircrafts. For this purpose, we use a non-invasive system that integrates thrust meters, vibration sensors and relative compression test, allowing us to detect any failure that is imperceptible without the use of measuring equipment.To develop this system we established a research license agreement for an ESA's patent :"Method and apparatus for monitoring an operational state of a system on the basis of telemetry". Using this patent it is essential to guarantee the levels of precision and innovation that we want. Business Model: We will sell our system online and through speciality stores, and will negotiate directly with the manufacturers of these aircrafts. Incubation period: 2018-2019

Advantages: By being able to predict failures before the aircraft starts its flight we can increase safety levels and decrease the number of accidents and deaths that consequently happen. Markets: We'll focus on the European and North American Market.

Space connection: We use information from the Copernicus program to identify environmental anomalies in sport areas. Business Model: Operational Consulting, by demand. Incubation period: 2018-2019

Space connection: Bio-decontamination machines for room/facility decontamination that can be used either in space to decontamination whole robotic spacecrafts, or in Earth by companies that manufacture and assemble components to be sent to space. Business Model: Direct sales to spacecraft manufacturers and launchers; to tap into early revenues coming from non-space bio-decontamination applications. Incubation period: 2018-2020

Space connection: The mOceanSense bring together different integrated devices (GPS, IMU), which have important and wide use in the spatial context. Think about be ready to explore the space! Business Model: For now, our focus is to deliver services for broadcasters and official bodies of nautical sports. For the first time, they will be able to transmit live performance metrics. To expand to the final costumer, also is present in our plans! Incubation period: 2018-2020

Advantages: We assemble in a single device the latest motion track technologies, highlighting our water flow sensor. An invention that broke all barriers and allows, for the first time, accurate motion analysis and effort relativization in the aquatic environment. Markets: We are working hard to be the reference system in the analysis of metrics for water sports, and we will be present in all aquatic equipment: surfboards, sailing, vessels, kayaks, and much more…

ESA BIC IN PORTUGAL

Management

Instituto Pedro Nunes (IPN) is responsible for the overall management of the ESA Business Incubation Centre in Portugal. IPN partners with multiple public and private organizations to ensure an excellent support to entrepreneurs.

Incubation Offices

ESA BIC Portugal offers entrepreneurs the possibility to locate their startup company in Coimbra, at Instituto Pedro Nunes, in Porto, at UPTEC, and in Cascais, at DNA Cascais.

Benefits – incentive scheme, business support and technical support

All incubatees will have access to 50.000 € to work on prototype, product or service development, IPR management and protection. They will also benefit from 80 hours of technical support and business incubation support.

Application

To benefit from the support provided by ESA BIC Portugal in the transfer and application of space technology to non-space markets, entrepreneurs must apply for the Permanent Open Call. Successful applicants may become incubatees in one of the ESA BIC Portugal locations!

PARTNERS

The European Space Agency
is an international organisation with 19 Member States whose mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world. By coordinating the financial and intellectual resources of its members, it can undertake programmes and activities far beyond the scope of any single European country. Its job is to draw up the European space programme and carry it through. ESA's programmes are designed to find out more about Earth, its immediate space environment, our Solar System and the Universe, as well as to develop satellite-based technologies and services, and to promote European industries.

ESA's Technology Transfer Programme Office (TTPO)
supports technology transfer initiatives in certain ESA Member States through the National Technology Transfer Network Initiative (NTTI). National initiatives focus on their respective countries and facilitate transfers by matching requests for specialised technologies from the national non-space sector with technology descriptions provided by the national space industry. The NTTI also addresses the need for funding and other support and may involve local companies to provide this.

The main mission of the
FCT Space Office
is to fully explore the benefits of the Portuguese participation in European space programmes, particularly in ESA space programmes.

In order to fulfill its mission the FCT Space Office is set to:

Monitor the participation of Portuguese academia and industry in European and international space programmes while providing recommendations relevant to the implementation of national scientific and technological initiatives and programmes;

Contribute to the maintenance of a level of national contribution to ESA and to other international organizations commensurate with the ambitions and capacities of the scientific and industrial communities in line with the policies established for the space domain;

Explore the synergies established with other international organizations of which Portugal is a member and, simultaneously, promote bidirectional technology transfer to other economic activity sectors;

Promote the visibility and competitiveness of the Portuguese space sector alongside the main European and international partners;

Act as the Industrial Liaison Office, promoting the participation of the national industry in the technological activities of the major International Scientific Organizations of which Portugal is a member state (such as ESA, CERN, ESO and ESRF).

Instituto Pedro Nunes – Association for Innovation and R&D in Science and Technology
is a non-profit private organization founded in 1991. IPN is a leading incubator and technology transfer institute in the Portuguese innovation ecosystem. It promotes innovation and technology transfer, being the main link between the University of Coimbra and the business sector. IPN’s work also encompasses R&TD in partnerships with companies, specialized training, dissemination of scientific and technological knowledge and support to start-up and spin-off tech companies, as well as advanced services on Intellectual Property (training, pre-diagnosis, patentability analysis and patent request preparation, support to negotiation and management of intellectual assets).

So far, the activity of technology transfer spanned across multiple areas (health,…), having participated in more than 200 R&TD projects in consortia or contracts, carried out dozens of technology transfer contracts, some leading to patented products, for more than 200 companies.

Through its business incubator, created in 1996, IPN has supported the creation and development of more than 180 technology and/or innovation-based projects with nationally and internationally distinguished results. The IPN incubator has actually won the “Best Science-based Incubator Award”, a worldwide contest organized by Technopolicy Network.

In the space sector, IPN has incubated some of the leading Portuguese space firms, such as Critical Software and Active Space Technologies, and has R&TD projects with major Portuguese players, for example EFACEC or Amorim Cork Composites.

At international level, IPN actively participates in the international networks EARTO (European Association of Research and Technological Organizations), TII (European Association for the Transfer of Technologies) and EBN (European Business Network), being an EBN accredited BIC.

DNA Cascais aims to contribute, using every adequate mean, for the promotion, incentive and development of entrepreneurship in general, especially focused on promoting social and young entrepreneurship in Cascais.

DNA Cascais acts mainly on developing skills and knowledge, by promoting and stimulating creativity and innovation, in an entrepreneurial environment. Below are some of the activities pertaining to this end: a) Business Incubators; b) Ideas Bank; c) Time bank, to support entrepreneurship; d) Ideas Contests on entrepreneurship; e) Business Angels Club; f) Interim management clinics; g) Societies or venture capital funds aimed at entrepreneurship; h) organizing national and international seminars, conferences, field trips and similar events; i) Professional internship programmes, in Portugal and abroad; j) Elaboration of studies and publications; k) international interchange of entrepreneurial information; l) Promoting information and training events on entrepreneurship; m) joining or collaborating with other national or international organizations pursuing the same objectives; n) organizing or collaborating with other activities related to the goal.

UPTEC - Science and Technology Park of University of Porto
is a fundamental structure of support knowledge transfer between the university and the market, created to sustain the University of Porto’s third mission - the social and economic leverage of its generated knowledge.

By fostering the creation of technological, scientific and creative based companies and attracting national and international innovation centers, UPTEC contributes in a sustainable way to the growth of the North Region of Portugal.
UPTEC is divided into thematic centers - Technologies, Creative Industries, Biotechnology and Sea. This allows it to follow a strategy of clustering and sharing of resources between startups, innovation centers and anchor projects, offering them the specific support they actually need, while assuring that they also benefit from a broader and transversal network of national and international partners and mentors.

After eight years of activity, UPTEC has supported more than 370 business ideas in areas as diverse as Nanosciences, Nanotechnologies, Materials and New Production, Security, Energy, Health, Food, Biotechnology, Information Technology, Publishing, Film, Architecture, Music, Design.